My Favourite Albums Of 2016

It’s a Top 164 this year… Now with links to reviews and music for every artist

Hopefully, by now, you’ll be well acquainted with our end of year Uncut, with The Rolling Stones on the cover, and our extensive Best Of 2016 charts. To complement those thorough lists compiled by 40-odd Uncut contributors, I’ve put together a personal list, stretching to 164 albums (it should probably now be 165, given how much I enjoyed the new Childish Gambino album this morning).

Usual caveats apply: numerical order gets pretty arbitrary pretty quickly, so please don’t assume too much significance/quality difference in what is listed at 132, and what comes in at 133 (the whole ordering concept gets dafter to me with each passing year, but I’m still a sucker for this sort of thing). I know 164 is a crazy number of albums, but I’ve genuinely enjoyed all of these, to some degree, and, given the usefulness of these end-of-year lists as a tool of discovery, it seems to me best to go long and inclusive rather than limiting the process to a Top 20 or whatever.

I’ve avoided embedding tracks this year, so that the page will actually load, but I have updated the list from when I first posted it a couple of weeks ago. Now you’ll find links to reviews written by myself and my Uncut colleagues, and to plenty of selections from Youtube, Souncloud and Bandcamp, so that you can get a better sense of what this weight of music actually sounds like.